With the new iPhone 7 Apple has released the iOS 10 operating system and with it comes Xcode 8 and a new version of the Swift language for the iOS developer community.

Swift 3.0 is an open source language that has been developed by the community together with Apple Engineers.
One of the great things about developing an open source language is that everybody can see the evolution of the language and inspect the code. In the official release notes there is a list of all the changes that have been implemented in the new Swift version.

Swift 3.0 is also the first release to include the Swift Package Manager, a tool for managing the distribution of Swift code trough dependencies.

Top 10 changes in Swift 3

Enums

1.- Import Objective-C Constants as Swift types

Parameters

2.- Consistent first argument labels

3.- #keyPath

4.- Better translation of Obj-C APIs

Functions And Closures

5.- Closure parameter names and labels

Collections

6.- Remove the ++ and – operators

Good Looking C

7.- Import as member

8.- Modernizing Swift’s Debugging Identifiers

9.- Modernized dispatching

API Design Guidelines

10.- Removing ‘NS’ prefix

The ‘NS’ prefix from key Foundation types is getting removed in Swift 3.

Apple is planning to release two major Swift updates next year. Swift 3.1 in spring and Swift 4.0 in Fall 2017. For the development of Swift 4.0 there will be two stages. During stage 1 Apple would like to focus on source and ABI stability first, and then move on to other features in stage 2 depending how much extra time there is.